Malala and the Cultural Struggles Between Large and Peripheral Cities

I planned to wake up, early. I woke up at 3 a.m. I had still time to get up, so I checked my social news feed. There were fierce battles between the two opposing camps over the return of Malala. In fact, it was amusing like the WWE wrestling shows than serious debates. Rationalizations, sarcasm and faking of news to undermine the opponent point of views were at their best, something I could rarely find in the traditional news outlets (except in the comment sections 😜). Besides, worrying about Malala's safety (although, being an international celebrity she has better security, now), I couldn't resist thinking that despite all the shortcomings, the original confusions and emotions expressed with  broken language and poor illustrations in social media were more capable in capturing the interests of the visitors than what professional reporters try to achieve with the professional maskings of their reports (professional reporters still have the advantage of higher confidence levels 😑). Anyhow, what I understood from all the debates were that Malala as a person was not the concern. The concern was the shift of cultural leadership from big seats of power like Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad to the peripheral cities. This is now a continuous process. Persons who manage to go outside the circle of the big cities are seen as anomalies (In popular culture, for example, the break out of the artists to outside world (particularly Bollywood) were not welcomed as such, too).

To outside world, Malala was seen as a girl who had stood for the education of girls (an anti-Taliban voice, to sum up). But I surprised noticing that many of those who opposed Malala were not conservatives (there were highly educated women, too).

Before going further, I want to emphasize that the cultural war between big cities and peripheral cities are not just limited to Pakistan. It's a regional phenomenon. In neighboring Afghanistan, this battle is the fiercest. The like battles  (when become imbalanced by foreign interferences) have torn apart countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain. I'm expecting it in Saudi Arabia too if the country continues to open up in a zigzag manner (the way she is going these days). Once the peripheral cities/populations find themselves culturally compatible with traditional cultural leaders of the country, then the culture war will become visible and the desperate attempts of the traditional cultural leaders to maintain their status quo will turn into open cultural battles. (Please see the additional note at the end of the knol)

Back to the story:

While reading the arguments, I fell back to sleep, and dreamt:

Children were picking sellable items among garbage pile in the garbage-tub (The municipality used to build brick-walled-garbage-dumping-sites in the neighborhood that were called garbage-tubs). A garbage truck dumped its load on the garbage picking children. I didn't see what happened to other children but I saw a girl struggling to get out the pile of the garbage. The pile of garbage was heavy, stinking and suffocating. She was about to give up when she felt something hit her head. It was the bucket of an excavator. She cried in pain and grabbed firmly the bucket. The excavator pulled her out of garbage and lifted her in the air. She cried for help and the spectators cheered and applauded her. She collected herself and felt like a heroine.

I don't see any patterns in the dreams and do not believe in the interpretations. But nonetheless, it was an amusing dream that very likely had some connections with the current divide on a girl from a periphery area that has become a cultural symbol. And that symbolic representation has made her a target practice of the politico-cultural struggles between metropolitan and peripheral cities.

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Additional Note:

                         With the exception of East Asia (which somehow managed to transition to modern world in more organized manner, if not linearly), the rest of Asia has maintained its historical ethno-cultural identities. Historically, while the boundaries of the kingdoms shifted, the boundaries of ethno-cultural identities remained mostly unchanged. The game of power was played by changes of alliances between those identities. The imposition of nation states based on the culture of the majority population has pushed the smaller cultural identities into the peripheries. It's slowly changing (Enriched by global cultural influences, particularly Western cultures and empowered by the digital communications, the peripheral cultures are reinventing their identities. I may go in more details in a future knol on the issue) and that's creating lots of confusions and chaos. Controversial individuals and events are not all linked to this phenomenon. The Syrian experience has made people even more sensitive and the reactions to the controversial individuals and events were taken more seriously (as existential threats) now than any time before.